Harper's diligent research, realistic portrayal, and insider/outsider heroine will hook those who can't get enough of England's turbulent history...bestseller Harper maintains her focus on the roles of women - both powerful and powerless - in Tudor England, resulting in another enjoyable proto-feminist historical romp

A walk side by side with one of history's most dynamic characters

Well paced and full of pitch-perfect detail, Harper's novel brings new life to an old subject and, as good as the best of Philippa Gregory, is sure to be a big hit with historical fiction fans and book clubs

All in all, a lively and historically grounded reimagining of two Tudor survivors

Taking a fresh view of Elizabeth I through the eyes of her confident governess, Harper delivers a strong story. Her keen sense of the role remarkable women played in history allows readers a fantastic view in this carefully researched, meticulously crafted book

Karen Harper's gripping and well-researched historical novel shines new light on a relatively obscure but highly influential player in the great Tudor saga

Has the compelling horror of a Gothic fairy tale... Chapman creates a novel that stays with the reader and leaves a sense of being drawn inexorably into a deepening nightmare

Subtly, disquietingly hermetic

Rural Finland may not seem a very likely locale for a gripping intellectual thriller, but pulling this off is merely the first of Maile Chapman's many accomplishments here. Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto - what a title! - is as creepy as Patricia Highsmith at her best and as psychologically sharp (and confounding) as early Ian McEwan. With its portrayal of how quickly the conscience in shipwreck succumbs to delusion, Chapman has written more than a beautifully observed and utterly convincing first novel: she has written something of unfakeable importance

This subtly unnerving tale raise goose bumps as the tension builds towards the menacing finale

Chapman deftly ratchets up the tension, pitting off-kilter emotions against a sense psychological doom as the novel builds to an unsettling conclusion

A wonderful novel which challenges your beliefs.

Translators give their wits and craft selflessly in service of others' work; this is a triumph of fidelity and unpretentiousness.

Tom McCarthy's C... a novel blazing with energy and, for all its postmodern ambitions, a rich, old-fashioned yarn

I surmise that it was because Tom McCarthy's C also hovers on an uneasy breaking-point, between fiction and philosophy, that I wanted it to win the Booker Man prize.

McCarthy's high-voltage writing runs through the reader like a charge.

New readers could grasp just how boldly he has tried to balance sumptuous period-fiction prose with a mischievous desire to sabotage his chosen form.

An exciting, revealing and touching story

The novel's interest (or lack thereof) lies mainly in its stubborn refusal of anything resembling a narrative payoff...I loved it, right down to the prose, which, unspooling in a vaguely menacing present-continuous, sounds like screenplay instructions to a set designer

A dazzlingly agile novel about the interconnectedness of things

Entertaining as well as ambitious

McCarthy's descriptions of nature and of the everyday details of the era are vivid, surprising and true. And while the writing is often beautiful and ornate, the story has a bracing, Beckett-like severity